Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941), poem 85 from “The Gardener”, 1914 Translated by the author from the original Bengali. New York: The Macmillan Company.
How I miss the North
by Kirill Uyutnov
The itching to be back in forests and mountains
2 more months
Hiking is the best way to spend your time, seriously.
btw curating a beautiful environment is about honouring yourself. when you choose to surround yourself with things that are well-made, thoughtfully designed, and meaningful, you affirm that your daily experience matters. investing in quality over convenience sends a subconscious message of self-worth that is completely foundational to building a better life.
Do you think the people who design modern sewing machines in plastic cases ever feel insignificant because of it? knowing that they're making machines with the lifespan of a dog when they could (if they'd been born a few generations earlier) be making machines with the lifespan of a Galapagos tortoise?
If only I ever become rich
The Library of Thorvald Boeck (1902). Harriet Backer (Norwegian, 1845-1932). Oil on canvas. National Gallery, Oslo, Norway.
Olaf Thorvald Boeck (1835-1901) was a Norwegian lawyer, civil servant and book collector. His library was known for its time as the largest private library in Norway. Backer’s painting incorporates only one part of the library.
First ever recorded snowball fight (1897)
Happy Holidays And Merry Christmas To All!
Fun ADHD hack is that you're allowed to just go to the library and reserve a study room for a couple of hours and make all your phone calls or whatever adult shit you need to do but can't because your house is for House Stuff and for some reason your brain has designated "phone calls for doctors and other such things" as School Adjacent and therefore refuses to do it in an insufficently academic environment. Like it's free. You can just do that.
For the last decade or so, I’ve been routinely attending a ride-on lawnmower race. I’ve always wanted to participate, but the high cost of used mowers is better spent on more practical vehicles, like literally anything else. Sometimes, though, the universe sends you a message. And in my case, that message came in the form of an awkward leg of a huge trade-in scam.
Picture, if you will, the humble redneck. They await the approach of big, fast domestic mowers. John Deeres, Cub Cadets, even weird modified Chinese stuff they looted from Aliexpress. There is jubilance, but that soon comes to an awkward hush. An unfamiliar engine note approaches.
My International 1480 combine harvester, all ten tons of it, is barrelling down the highway at a clip somewhere between “tepid” and “jaunty.” Even though I have shown up for a race, I am sandbagging a little bit, making sure that the bets get settled against my vehicle before I show them the might of a fully operational monster such as mine.
Technically, there is no violation. I had looked at the rulebook from every angle in the previous year: it has the correct number of wheels, the proper agricultural intent, and with precise work on the tiller, it can even (poorly) mow a suburban lawn. Is it modified? Oh yes, yes indeed, but I see the nitrous bottles poking out from the rows of Kubotas at the starting line.
And when I leave the starting line, it is a thing of beauty. At least for a few milliseconds. It seems that the wizards at International Harvester simply did not comprehend of a situation in which the frame of their combine would be launched into the air by means of one thousand eight hundred foot-pounds of supercharger-bolstered torque. I had erroneously believed that the loose soil of the rural community would let the wheels dip in, but now I am facing directly into the sky, having twelve o’ clocked hard on my wheelie, shooting flames from my exhaust and whirling vertical blades of death towards the grandstand.
It’s not about whether you win or lose. Sometimes it’s about how many pages you add to the rulebook.